The efficient distribution of product-related information to end-users and potential end-users is an important tool for minimizing sales cycle times, improving user satisfaction, reducing warranty costs, and minimizing manufacturer liability. The presentation of desired and regulated information often occupies a great deal of product label space and is often limiting to the industrial and aesthetic design of product packaging.
Explosive growth of the Internet and World Wide Web has provided an efficient means for the distribution of information, and product-related information in particular. To date, accessing product information has required a user to determine the manufacturer of the product, determine the manufacturer's URL, enter the URL into a web browser, and search the manufacturer's web site to find relevant product information.
The present invention makes use of a product's UPC or other symbol to access data about the product.
The symbology-related background of the invention is described in The Bar Code Book by Roger C. Palmer, hereby incorporated by reference.
In the field of automated data collection and, more particularly, optical data encodation, bar code symbologies have achieved wide use and have proved themselves to be very reliable and cost effective. Conventional linear bar code symbologies encode data as a series of variable width bars separated by variable width spaces. Generally, bars are formed from dark ink on a light colored background that forms the spaces.
One particularly successful and widespread family of bar code symbologies is the UPC/EAN/JAN family. This group of bar code symbologies is used to identify virtually every type of pre-packaged retail item sold in the U.S. and Canada, Europe, and Japan, respectively.
The Universal Product Code (UPC), European Article Numbering (EAN), and Japanese Article Numbering (JAN) systems are administered by the Uniform Code Council (UCC) and its foreign affiliates. Manufacturers who are members of the UCC may be assigned one or more 5-digit Company Prefixes, or company identifiers, that are used to identify the manufacturer in the context of the UPC system. Manufacturers, in turn, are free to assign a 5-digit product identifier code to each of their retail products. By using the combination of a company prefix with a product identifier code, it is thus possible to identify each product manufactured by UCC member companies. EAN and JAN systems are administered similarly.
To automate the retail check-out process, company prefixes and product identifiers are combined and encoded in UPC (also EAN and JAN) bar code symbols that are affixed to products. For an item to be checked out, a checker or customer scans a UPC/EAN/JAN symbol. A look-up in the store's computer compares the scanned symbol to a list of products and determines the associated price. For the system to work properly, the store must maintain an up-to-date database that includes at least the UPC number and price for each item carried. Usually an alphanumeric description of the item is also associated with the UPC number.
The UPC symbology is a fixed-length numeric continuous symbology comprising characters having two bars and two spaces distributed within 7 modules. Each bar and space is between one and four modules wide. In the UPC-A variant, the symbol is divided into two halves separated by two center guard bars and bounded both left and right by a pair of outer guard bars. The left half of the UPC-A symbol comprises a 5-digit company prefix directly encoded (for number system characters 0, 6, and 7) and a number system character encoded by the parity pattern of the left characters. The right half of the UPC-A symbol comprises a 5-digit product identifier directly encoded and a Mod 10 check digit for the first 11 symbol characters. More recently, new number system digits 18, and 9 have been allocated for assignment, with number system 8 being used for 8-digit (7 digits plus 1-digit number system) company prefixes. Each half of the UPC-A symbol may be independently decoded.
Other versions of the UPC/EAN/JAN symbology are used for reduced space applications (for instance, UPC version E) and for applications requiring additional data as in the 2- and 4-digit book addenda.
Another symbology standard, UCC-128 (and the equivalent EAN-128) is based on the Code 128 symbology but includes a data structure well-adapted to tracking shipments within a supply chain. The UCC-128 symbology is similar to the UPC symbology in that it includes provision for encoding a company prefix and a company-assigned code. In the case of UCC-128, the company-assigned code is a shipment serial number that can be used to identify uniquely the contents of a particular shipment from that company.
More recently, the UCC and EAN International have been investigating alternative data storage media for associating a UCC/EAN structured data set to an item. One example is the use of magnetically- or electrically-encoded data that may be accessed by a non-line-of-sight interrogator such as an RFID interrogator. Another example of such innovation includes the RSS and composite symbologies that use a combination of linear and 2D symbols to encode more data in less space. Bar code symbols, RF tags, 2D symbols, composite symbols, laser cards, touch memory, and other similar objects are known collectively as portable data carriers.